A Painted House

Have you ever read that book?  A Painted House by John Grisham?  It's really beautifully written.  I'm not normally a huge John Grisham fan, but he departed from his normal lawyer/political intrigue stuff and wrote an amazing historical novel with symbolism and theme and all kinds of classic elements.  It's a really great read.

Anyways, I get to bore you with another house update.  I think I know that the peeling paint on our house was really, really bothering my dad, but I had been told by oodles of people that you can't paint once it starts freezing at night.  And it's been freezing at night for, like, a few weeks.  And Ben and I were planning on painting it in the spring June when it actually stops freezing.  We were thinking dark, rich cocoa browns, deep barn reds, and tans.  So why paint now when we're going to paint in 7 months?  But Dad just kept saying over and over again how crappy that peeling paint looked.  He said he wanted to check out our options.  I told him to knock himself out.

So he went to Home Depot to ask the Paint Dude (I think that's his official job description that he will forever put on his resume - "I was Paint Dude at Home Depot...") about the possibility of painting.  The Paint Dude said that there was a special kind of paint that could hold up if it dipped to freezing the night after it was painted.  But here's the clincher - you have to apply the paint in 50+ degrees, and it has to stay at 50+ degrees for at least four hours while it dries.  If it doesn't, the paint will peel off when it freezes.

This was a dicey situation.  But Saturday promised to be warm, so Ben and Dad got the paint and rented a paint spray gun thingey.

We had scraped the peeling paint the day before.  My cute dad:

The day before they painted, when we scraped, was BUTT COLD.  I was perma-cold the rest of the night.  Here's a glimpse of the scraped house.  I could have sworn I took more of these pre-paint pictures...

While Mom and I went to a Pot Class (more on that later - and no, it has nothing to do with marijuana) and Ben watched the kids, my dad taped newspaper to the windows, etc.  Then, when Ben was awailable, as his cute Chinese interpreter used to always say, he went over and they painted that house.

Here are some "after" pictures:

They only painted the parts that had been scraped, but it's such a good match, right?  You can't tell where the old paint ends and the new one begins.  It's a good patch-up just to last through the winter.

Kay, so this piece of wood that is warped in the following picture will have to be totally replaced in the spring.  But for now, it just got sanded a bit and painted:

 Look at that cute butt.

The boys did a great job.  And then I went over after they were done and planted a bunch more shrubs and moved some existing shrubs.  More on that later, as well.

And, luckily, we got the four hours of 50+ degrees before it dipped down to freezing.  And the paint has held up really well.  Phew.